Introduction
Welcome to the Partnership Benchmark 2023. This is the fourth successful edition of our study and this year we are very happy to extend the study across the border to the Netherlands. The Dutch IT sourcing market is extremely dynamic and much larger than Belgium. It has had several years of a head start in sourcing and offshoring. No wonder then that several of the largest IT service providers have their European HQ in the Netherlands, instead of Germany or France.
We interviewed close to 60 Dutch clients and assessed 120+ contracts. We assessed the performance of 15+ service providers, 11 of which are featured in our report. A strong note of thank you to Gaby van Otterdijk for pushing this through. In the future years we expect to bring the Dutch study at the same level of participation as the Belgian study. The bankruptcy of Giarte has left a hole in the market, which we aim to fill with a differentiated approach bringings learnings for both clients and service providers to strengthen their collaborations. You will find the results of the 2023 Netherlands study on the website.
As regards to the Belgian study for 2023, we are currently busy with the interviews which shall continue into October. This year will be our biggest and strongest study with more than a 100 client organizations and 22 providers profiles. The results will be published in November/December.
By the end of this year's study, we will have reviewed 500+ contracts across 160+ companies and public institutions across the BeNeLux. All of this done through in-depth one on one interviews with leading client CIOs, application leads, infrastructure leads or vendor managers. Throughout the year we talk to the leading service providers to understand their offerings and capabilities, their positioning and their future vision. This gives us an unparalleled 360 degree insight into the leading service providers.
In 2023 organizations have recovered reasonably well from the uncertainties of last year - COVID, the war, energy shock, and economic uncertainty. While we are not out of the woods yet, budgets have returned and growth is on the horizon. The huge war for talent and crazy attrition that we saw in the last years also seems to have stemmed. However some challenges remain. Remote working allowed several managers in India to hire people from across the country - now they need to manage distributed teams. Even people working in the same city only work together 2-3 days a week. Remote working makes it difficult to train and inculcating a feeling of belonging especially with fresh employees. More on this in our article 'Back to the office?'.
The action is on the Infrastructure and Cloud for the moment. We see many RFPs and sourcing changes in the market. Many organizations are revisiting their organization and sourcing as they move from on-prem to the cloud. Do they setup an internal Cloud CoE? Do they contract a specialist managed cloud services provider? Is it better to go more local or more nearshore? There is a scarcity of cloud skills on the market and we see many organizations struggling with their incumbent provider. This space is rapidly evolving as most service providers steer away from the datacenter to cloud. This brings in new players who were previously strong only on the applications side and niche cloud services companies. More on this in our article 'No place like Cloud'.
Another big challenge is managing the cost of the cloud. Most clients see their cloud costs burgeon way beyond budget and this needs knowledge, attention and discipline. More on this in our article 'The art of FinOps'.
Finally, a call for attention for the CIO to focus on Service Integration and Management. The proliferation of technologies leads to complex multi-vendor ecosystems. This creates issues in terms of siloed delivery, inconsistent user experience, inability to drive organization wide initiatives such as automation, and lack of end to end visibility. Our study shows that 76% of the ICT departments do not have the needed capabilities today to correctly manage and steer their vendors. More on this in our article 'SIAM as a catalyst'.
Interestingly, we have have the same set of Leaders for both Application & Digital services and Infrastructure and Cloud services in both Belgium and Netherlands. While Kyndryl stands out as the only Leader for Infrastructure & Cloud services, we have Accenture, Capgemini and TCS as the Leaders for Application services.
We hope you enjoy reading our report. Your feedback is always welcome.
Vikrant & Geert
